NATO

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). This alliance of sixteen sovereign Euro-Atlantic countries is dedicated to the proposition of maintaining democratic freedom by means of collective defence. The Atlantic Alliance, as it is also known, has been the dominant feature of European security and defence for half a century and remains at bottom a device designed to guarantee continuing US military commitment to western European defence. Latterly it has begun to find a new role in peacekeeping. Like the UN, it has been an expression of a US foreign policy based on ideals believed to be intrinsically favourable to US interests and will continue to exist as long as it serves that purpose.

NATO began with the Washington Treaty of 4 April 1949, drafted upon the basis of the Brussels Pact of March 1948 (UK, France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg), and is a landmark of the start of the Cold War. Primarily intended to deter Soviet expansionism, it was also a response to the questions of collective security that did not find satisfactory answers in 1919-39 and rested upon Article 51 of the UN Charter, which gives UN members the right to individual and collective self-defence. It had three fundamental objectives: to reduce the possibility that Soviet military threats would reduce western Europe to client status, to counter US isolationism, and to co-ordinate the armed forces of western powers occupying Germany. Later it was to provide a safe framework within which Germany herself might rearm.

Consisting of a preamble and fourteen clauses, the Washington Treaty embodied the will of the signatories to further democratic values and to reduce economic conflict (Article II) ; to share the burdens of defence individually and collectively (Article III) ; to consult together in the face of threats (Article IV) ; to regard an attack upon one member as an attack upon all, and, in concert with one another and as individuals, to assist the victims of attack (Article V). The Washington Treaty delineates the geographical boundaries of the alliance (Article VI) ; creates the North Atlantic Council to implement the treaty (Article IX) ; provides for the accession of new members (Article X) ; governs ratification according to constitutional processes (Article XI) ; makes provisions for review of the treaty (Article XII). With the signing of the treaty, a new struggle began in the 1950s to put teeth into these clauses through effective organization.

From the outset, the composition of alliance membership and the geographical limits of the treaty area have caused controversy among NATO members. The twelve signatories of April 1949 (UK, France, the BENELUX countries, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Portugal, Italy, USA, and Canada) were joined by Greece and Turkey in 1952 to secure the Mediterranean and Near Eastern flanks; years of diplomatic haggling between the USA, UK, and France preceded the accession of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955, while the accession of Spain in 1982 had to follow the restoration of democracy after the 40-year hiatus under Franco. Despite the objections of the Russian Federation and the doubts of some foreign-policy experts in the west, in July 1997 the sixteen NATO members invited Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary to join the alliance by the spring of 1999.

The civil and military organizations of the North Atlantic Treaty emerged during 1949-54 and the basic arrangement has remained in place since then. The civilian headquarters for the North Atlantic Council (NAC) originated in 1950 on a small basis in London; a larger headquarters opened in Paris in 1952, which later moved to Brussels-Evere in 1967 after France withdrew from the integrated military structure. The NAC stands at the pinnacle of the NATO civil entity as the highest decision-making body of the alliance. The NAC's overall tasks are delineated in the Washington Treaty itself. The Secretary-General chairs the council, as well as oversees the work of the International Staff (IS). The various nations dispatch Permanent Representatives (Ambassadors) to the council, who are supported by their own civil and military staffs. The council offers the forum for diplomatic consultation and the co-ordination of strategy and policy. All member countries have the right to express their views around the council table. The allies take decisions based upon the collective will of the member governments determined by common consent. The NAC meets at the ministerial level twice a year, while summit meetings attended by heads of state occur as circumstances of grand strategy require.

The Secretary-General also chairs the Defence Planning Committee (DPC) which deals with aspects of collective defence planning. The DPC normally consists of the Permanent Representatives, but also meets at the Defence Ministerial level twice a year. The DPC provides guidance to NATO's Military Authorities to perfect common measures of collective defence and military integration. From the mid-1960s until the end of the Cold War, the Nuclear Planning Group (NPG) assumed prominence as a subsidiary body that formulated alliance nuclear policy and strategy for the NAC. Since 1991, the North Atlantic Co-Operation Council (NACC), supplanted in 1997 by the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) within the ‘Partnership for Peace’ (1994), as well as the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council, came into existence as adjuncts of the NAC. These new bodies around the NAC symbolized how NATO embraced its former opponents and sought a modus vivendi with the Russian Federation and successor states of the defunct USSR.

The pivotal importance of the civilian organization notwithstanding, soldiers and weapons arrayed under NATO's compass banner bulk largest in the public image of the alliance. The Military Committee stands at the top of NATO's military pillar. The Military Committee originally met in Washington, only to move to Brussels in 1967. It is subordinate to the NAC and consists of the chiefs of staff of the member nations, who advise the NAC on all military matters and who oversee the measures necessary for the common defence of the North Atlantic area. The Chairman of the Military Committee is a four-star (lieutenant) general chosen by the member nations. The International Military Staff (IMS) supports the work of the Military Committee which meets twice a year at chiefs of staff level, and at other times at the so-called National Military Representatives level designated by the general staffs of the members' armed forces.

The perfection of common military structures, forces, and mutual efforts within the integrated military structure has stood at the centre of NATO's military organization since 1949-50. The annual review of military policy and force structure (Defence Planning Questionnaire) forms a major aspect of this effort, as does the system of international, integrated commands. From its creation in 1950-1, this system exists in peacetime to provide the strategic and operational framework for the defence of the treaty territory via a network of major and subordinate military commands. Best known of these major NATO Commands is Allied Command Europe with its Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe (SHAPE) created in 1951 near Paris by Gen Eisenhower and moved to Casteau, Belgium, in 1967. Such other commands included Allied Command Atlantic (Headquarters, Supreme Headquarters, Allied Command Atlantic, Norfolk, VA) and Allied Command, Channel, (dissolved 1994/5). Integration has meant in practice improvements in the quality of collective command and control, the speeding-up of reaction times, the equitable sharing of the alliance defence burden, and increases in alliance combat power. During the Cold War, the alliance differentiated the mass of forces assigned to NATO as (1) remaining under national command in peacetime, while (2) in crisis and war, coming under direct command of SHAPE's Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR), a US four-star general officer.

Since its inception in 1949, the alliance has faced repeated trials and turmoil arising from the course of the Cold War; the imperative to adapt collective defence to allied, democratic statecraft; and the need to master the challenges of technology and defence. The making of NATO strategy among the sixteen democracies has never been especially easy, but this undertaking has proceeded better than the dark expectations of NATO's critics would have suggested. From the outset of the alliance, NATO members had to address the perceived imbalance of forces, in which the Atlantic countries could muster but 14 active divisions against 175 Soviet divisions. This circumstance grew all the more troublesome with the outbreak of the Korean war in June 1950, which worsened fears that war could spread to Europe.

The NAC meeting at Lisbon of February 1952 saw the alliance agree to a conventional build-up of some 50 divisions and 4, 000 aircraft by the year's close and 96 divisions by 1955. At the end of 1952, NATO put forward a new strategic concept, the so-called MC 14/1. This doctrine of massive conventional defence as well as long-range nuclear strikes against the USSR underlay the planned 96-division force. Such strategy required the armament of the Federal Republic of Germany, but the cost and practicality of MC 14/1 doomed it almost from the start. Following a British lead, in 1953-4 the administration of Pres Eisenhower drastically cut the conventional forces and opted for nuclear deterrence. The USA preferred to rely on light atomic projectiles as well as the new hydrogen bombs within the strategy of ‘massive retaliation’. The nuclearization of NATO followed during the latter half of the 1950s with the strategy of sword (nuclear air and missile power, MC 70) and shield (conventional ground forces, MC 14/2). The need to reinforce NATO's nuclear strength became especially intense after the Anglo-French-Israeli combined operation of 1956 against the Egyptian takeover of the Suez Canal led to Soviet nuclear threats against France and the UK.

Nuclear crises of 1958-62 over Berlin and Soviet nuclear forces on Cuba pointed to the need for a more graduated strategy than that of all-out nuclear war. The administration of Pres John Kennedy embraced a strategy of ‘flexible response’ in 1961-3, which led to a conventional build-up in Europe and US demands for the NATO allies to follow suit. This development combined with Franco-American disagreements over the manner of alliance governance since the late 1950s caused French Pres de Gaulle to withdraw French forces from the integrated military structure in 1967. In December 1967, NATO adopted MC 14/3, a doctrine of a flexible conventional and nuclear response in the face of Soviet escalation. The NAC also embraced a grand strategy that sought a ‘stable relationship’ with the Warsaw Pact and the resolution of the underlying causes of tension on the basis of ‘adequate military’ strength, a policy that came to be known as ‘Harmel’ doctrine.

The final challenge to NATO from the USSR-led Warsaw Pact came in the mid-to-late 1970s when the Soviets deployed large numbers of intermediate range missiles in the theatre. Amid the orchestrated clamour of peace movements, NATO members found the resolve to permit the stationing of Pershing II and Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles in West Germany, the UK, the BENELUX, and Italy. The emergence of less confrontational leadership in the USSR amid signs of national exhaustion led the Warsaw Pact and NATO to scrap these missiles at the end of the 1980s.

The ‘underlying causes’ of political tension in Europe seemed to evaporate with the collapse of communist regimes in central and eastern Europe and the disappearance of the Warsaw Treaty Organization in 1990-1. Despite the abrupt disappearance of the monolithic Soviet bloc threat, NATO continued to exist because of the perceived need to retain a US presence in Europe and to preclude the renationalization of security and defence policies in Europe. In mid-1990 the alliance announced its willingness to embark on a policy of co-operation (London Declaration) with former opponents, followed in turn by the creation of the North Atlantic Co-Operation Council in late 1991 and the promulgation of a new strategic concept that foresaw a NATO collective security role in crisis management and rapid reaction expeditionary forces.

The new doctrine was developed and tested in the new countries of former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, in the face of armed attempts to retain hegemony by Serbia, employing tactics with a sinister echo of Nazism. Despite bombast about how Europe alone would deal with the problem from such influential personages as the prime minister of Luxembourg, the Serbs continued to test the resolve of the alliance and find it wanting until in 1995 a tacitly NATO approved counter-attack by Croatia and a short but intense display of US air power under the NATO umbrella raised the price to the Serbs sufficient to make them accept a ceasefire and a partition of Bosnia that has proved surprisingly stable.

A further crisis in Kosovo was again characterized by brinkmanship until mainly US bombers were set loose to attack Serb troops occupying the territory and to destroy infrastructure within Serbia. The Serbs unexpectedly held out for six weeks while collateral damage mounted, and the broken terrain and uncertain weather rendered airstrikes surprisingly ineffective even against armoured units. UK, US, German, and French ground forces subsequently moved in unopposed in a peacekeeping role, with a Russian airborne contingent rolling in at the last minute to secure the airport at Pristina, the capital of the province. Details have emerged of a serious dispute between SACEUR and the British ground force commander over whether or not to confront the Russian force, while revenge killings by ethnic Albanians against ethnic Serbian Kosovars continue to complicate the situation.

Two seeds for future trouble in the alliance were sowed: the first was that it reminded Russia forcefully that NATO remains an organization antagonistic to her traditional interests (the defence of Serbia was, after all, the reason for her entry into WW I) ; the second was that certain European leaders irritated an important segment of US public opinion by presuming too much, seeking to define NATO policy as though it did not remain primarily an expression of US military power. The degree to which European leaders may be able to use that strength in the furtherance of newly expanded definitions of continental collective security interests will be the main problem facing NATO into the 21st century.

— Donald Abenheim/Hugh Bicheno

—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—was originally created by representatives of twelve Western powers: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States, in 1949, as a military security alliance to deter the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics' (USSR) expansion on the European Continent. From 1945 to 1949, to widen the Communist sphere of influence, the USSR had annexed Czechoslovakia, East Prussia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and sections of Finland, and had penetrated into the governments of Albania, Bulgaria, and Hungary.

The foundation for NATO had been set in Brussels, Belgium, in March 1948, when representatives of Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom met to forge a mutual assistance treaty to provide a common defense system. The Brussels Treaty stipulated that should any of the five signatories be the target of “armed aggression in Europe,” the other treaty parties would provide the party attacked “all the military aid and assistance in their power.” In June 1948, after a losing battle by isolationists, the U.S. Congress adopted a resolution recommending that the United States join in a defensive pact for the North Atlantic area. President Harry S. Truman urged U.S. participation in NATO as a critical part of his policy of containment of Soviet expansion. Containment had begun with the Truman Doctrine of 1947 with military assistance to Greece and Turkey to resist Communist subversion. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on 4 April 1949 in Washington, D.C. It formally committed the European signatories and the United States and Canada to the defense of Western Europe. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty, 82 to 13. This treaty marked a fundamental departure with tradition of the United States because it was Washington's first peacetime military alliance since the Franco‐American Alliance of 1778. In October 1949, in the Mutual Defense Assistance Act, Congress authorized $1.3 billion in military aid for NATO. Greece and Turkey joined NATO in 1952. The Federal Republic of Germany joined in 1955 following an agreement on the termination of the Allies' postwar occupation of West Germany and an understanding that the country would maintain foreign forces on its soil. A rearmed Germany became a major component of NATO.

The USSR strongly opposed the NATO alliance. The Berlin Blockade in 1947–48 and the threat of war had in fact given impetus to the creation of NATO. Following the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, fearing the possibility of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe as a result of a miscalculation by Moscow, NATO countries expanded their military forces in Europe. Allied forces in Western Europe numbered twelve divisions to deter a Soviet threat of eighty divisions. The sending of several U.S. divisions to Europe was strongly debated in the U.S. Congress. Proponents of isolationism, including former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert Taft, opposed the assignment of ground troops to Europe. Others, including retired Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, supported an increase in the U.S. commitment to the Cold War and urged expansion of NATO forces. The isolationists lost, and Truman in 1951 added four more to the two divisions already in Germany to bring the Seventh U.S. Army to six divisions. Truman also brought Eisenhower out of retirement to become Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR), following the creation of Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in 1951. NATO ministers, in the Lisbon Agreement on NATO Force Levels of February 1952, set new force goals for 1954 consisting of 10,000 aircraft and 89 divisions, half of them combat‐ready. These were unrealistic; but by 1953, NATO had fielded 25 active divisions, 15 in Central Europe, and 5,200 aircraft, making it at least equal to Soviet forces in East Germany. In 1955, Moscow created the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance composed of Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Hungary, Poland, and Romania.

East‐West relations were further strained by Nikita Khrushchev, who emerged as the Soviet leader after Josef Stalin's death in 1953. Although he had criticized Stalin's dictatorship and had accused his predecessor of escalating international tensions, Khrushchev ordered a Soviet force into Hungary to suppress a rebellion and maintain Communist rule in 1956. In 1957, the USSR's launching of Sputnik, the first of the space satellites, indicated that the Soviet Union was developing long‐range nuclear missiles. NATO had planned in 1954 to use nuclear weapons in case of a massive Soviet invasion. In 1957, it planned to make the thirty NATO divisions and its tactical aircraft nuclear‐capable. By 1960, NATO's commander, SACEUR, probably had some 7,000 nuclear weapons; but two SACEURs, Gen. Alfred Gruenther and Gen. Lauris Norstad, warned of NATO's declining conventional capabilities as a result of reductions or redeployments in British and French forces.

During the 1960s, French president Charles de Gaulle rejected the lead of the United States and Britain in Europe and pushed for a larger diplomatic role for France. The French developed their own nuclear capacity; then, in 1966, while still remaining a part of the NATO community, France withdrew its troops from the alliance and requested that NATO's headquarters and all allied units and installations not under the control of French authorities be removed from French soil. NATO headquarters officially opened in October 1967, in Brussels, where it has remained. East and West efforts to achieve peaceful coexistence decreased a year later when the Soviet Union and four of its satellite nations invaded Czechoslovakia.

In an effort to reach an era of detente, a relaxation of tensions reached through reciprocal beneficial relations between East and West, the Nixon administration took the lead with the Leonid Brezhnev government in Moscow, and NATO members and Warsaw Pact members opened the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in November 1969. In May 1972, the first series of SALT Treaties was signed. The following year a SALT II agreement was reached, although it was never ratified by the United States. Further efforts during the 1970s for East‐West balanced force reductions proved unsuccessful. The Arab‐Israeli War did little to ease world tensions when it erupted on 6 October 1973, after which the Soviets implied that they might intervene in the crisis due to the strategic importance of oil reserves in that part of the world. A year later, Brezhnev accused NATO of creating a multinational nuclear force and called for cancelation of the alliance as a first step toward world peace. In 1979, the USSR invaded Afghanistan and that ongoing conflict caused the suspension of negotiations between the United States and the USSR on reductions in intermediate‐range nuclear forces (INF) that had opened in 1981. Talks resumed in 1984 primarily to prevent the militarization of outer space and then led to negotiations on arms control and disarmament. Reformer Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR in March 1985, and that October he met President Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik, Iceland, to discuss ceilings of 100 nuclear missile warheads for each side (none of which would remain in Europe) and 100 residual warheads to remain in Soviet Asia and on U.S. territories in the Pacific. Verification arrangements were also agreed upon for the first time.

By the end of the 1980s, dramatic changes had occurred in the Warsaw Pact countries. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall was opened, which led the way to a unified Germany ten months later. Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania took steps toward breaking from Soviet domination. When Russian troops were withdrawn from Eastern Europe in 1990, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved. In response to these events, NATO members at a summit conference in London in July 1990 declared that they no longer considered the Soviets to be an adversary and laid plans for a new strategic concept that was adopted in 1991 in Rome. The concept reaffirmed the significance of collective defense to meet evolving security threats—particularly from civil wars and massive refugee problems—and established the basis for peacekeeping operations, as well as coalition crisis management both inside and outside the NATO area. It also stressed cooperation and partnership with the emerging democracies of the former Warsaw Pact.

The North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) was created in 1991 to draw former Soviet republics, as well as the Baltic states and Albania, into a closer relationship with NATO countries. The same year, the Soviet Union established diplomatic links with NATO and joined the NACC on a foreign ministerial level. Hungary and Romania entered a twenty‐five‐nation Partnership for Peace (PFP), an arm of NATO created in 1994. The PFP administers exercises, exchanges, and other military contacts to encourage military reform. The partnership also provides for peacekeeping, humanitarian, and rescue operations. Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Poland, and the Czech Republic aspired to become full members of NATO, and debate opened on a second‐tier Russian NATO membership allowing for political, but not military, integration for the former Soviet Union. In June 1994, Russian leader Boris Yeltsin announced that the Russians would join the PFP, but Russian fears of an eastward expansion of NATO remained a contentious issue.

In 1992, due to the escalation of the Bosnian Crisis, and Serbia's armed support of the Bosnian Serbs against Muslims and Croats, NATO's mission was expanded to include peacekeeping operations in support of United Nations (UN) efforts to restrain the fighting and find a solution to the conflict. In July 1992, NATO ships and aircraft commenced monitoring operations in support of the UN arms embargoes on Serbia and Bosnia from the former Yugoslavia. In April 1993, NATO aircraft began patrolling the skies over Bosnia to monitor and enforce the UN ban on Serbian military aircraft. In November 1995, following U.S.‐sponsored peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, a peace agreement was signed in Paris in December calling for a Muslim‐Croat federation and a Serb entity in Bosnia. During 1996, fourteen non‐NATO countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, and Ukraine) were invited to contribute to the NATO‐led Implementation Force (IFOR). All the NATO countries with armed forces (Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States) pledged to contribute military forces to the operation, and Iceland provided medical personnel. With 60,000 troops, 20,000 of them from the U.S. forces, IFOR was the largest military operation ever undertaken by NATO. It was the first ground force operation, the first deployment “out of area,” and the first joint operation with NATO's PFP partners and other non‐NATO countries. NATO's IFOR halted the pitched battles and urban sieges that ravaged Bosnia during the four‐year war. National elections were held in September 1996, and plans were made for a reduced IFOR force.

The collapse of Communism in Europe led NATO to search for new roles beyond that of a mutual defense pact. One was to bolster democracy and national security in former Warsaw bloc nations; consequently in March 1999, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland were made members of NATO. The other new role for NATO was as a regional policeman seeking to restrict ethnic wars, terrorism, and the generation of massive flows of refugees through genocidal violence. Consequently, as a result of military and paramilitary actions by Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic against hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo, NATO in late March 1999 began a military offensive against Serbian forces and installations By April 1999, when the 50th anniversary of the establishment of NATO was observed, NATO forces in the Kosovo Crisis were engaged in the largest military assault in Europe since World War II. The NATO air offensive ended successfully with the Serbian forces withdrawal from Kosovo in June and the establishment of a UN administered and NATO implemented peacekeeping force there. With the end of the Cold War (and NATO's first war), a new era for NATO had clearly emerged.

[See also Berlin Crises; Collective Security.]

Bibliography

• NATO Information Service, NATO Today, 1987.
• NATO Information Service, The North Atlantic Treaty Organization Facts and Figures, 11th ed., 1989.
• Lawrence S. Kaplan, NATO & the US: The Enduring Alliance, 1994.
• NATO Office of Information and Press, NATO Handbook, 1995.
• Department of Defense, Office of International Security Affairs, U.S. Security for Europe and NATO (June 1995).
• S. Nelson Drew, NATO from Berlin to Bosnia: Trans‐Atlantic Security in Transition, 1995.
• William Thomas Johnsen, NATO Strategy in the 1990s: Reaping the Peace Dividend or the Whirlwind?, 1995

ˈnāṭō abbr. North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949, was the culmination of Western responses to a growing perception of threat from the Soviet Union in the years following the end of the Second World War. It followed on from the beginning of American re-engagement in Europe with Marshall Aid and the Truman Doctrine in 1947, from the formation of the Brussels treaty 1948 among Britain, France, and Benelux, and from the joint allied response to the Berlin blockade in 1948-9. NATO originally had twelve members: the United States, Britain, France, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Portugal. Greece and Turkey joined in 1952, the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955, and Spain in 1982. A post-Cold War round of enlargement began with the admission of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in 1999, and there is a queue of nine or more candidates hoping for admission in subsequent rounds. The parties to NATO agree to treat an attack on any one of them as an attack against all, each member being obliged to assist those attacked by taking ‘such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area’. They agree to settle disputes among themselves by peaceful means, to avoid economic conflict, and to work towards economic collaboration with each other. The North Atlantic Council is the basic political directorate of the alliance, and its military command is centred on the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).

NATO functioned successfully throughout the Cold War as the main bastion of Western defence (and of American containment policy and forward defence) against the Soviet Union. Despite nearly continuous internal wrangling over military policy and burden-sharing, the alliance sustained a solid front against Soviet political and military pressure. It survived the crisis of French military disengagement in 1966, and managed to contain, though not to solve, the antagonism of Greece and Turkey. NATO survived two serious crises over nuclear weapons. The first was in the early and mid-1960s, when the credibility of American military guarantees to Europe was weakened by the Soviet Union's development of the capability to mount nuclear strikes against the United States. The second was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and concerned the controversial decision to deploy Cruise and Pershing II theatre nuclear weapons in Europe.

NATO's Cold War role can be summarized by the remark that its purpose was to keep the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out. Between 1949 and 1989 it accomplished all three of these objectives successfully. With the ending of the Cold War, NATO has suffered from a crisis of function, tested by a string of awkward crises in the Balkans. The European Union hovers on the brink of establishing its own defence and security identity, creating, among other things, awkward questions about the division of labour in the Balkans and elsewhere. But despite the loss of its original purpose, and the winding down of American force levels in Europe, NATO is still in demand. Given the potential for turbulence in post-Cold War Europe, most European states still feel more comfortable having America ‘in’. The United States needs NATO to support its superpower status, and NATO members as a whole are reluctant to abandon the extensive network of military collaboration and integration that they have built up.

— Barry Buzan

NATO is the acronym for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, established in Washington, DC, on 4 April 1949 by the USA, Canada, UK, France, and other west European countries. This was the culmination of diplomatic efforts by those, including the British government, who saw a defence alliance as vital to safeguard western Europe against possible threats by the USSR. The signatories committed themselves to taking ‘necessary action’ to aid any member facing attack. The Korean War induced the formation of an integrated military command for NATO, which functioned well until the end of the Cold War. Both its length of existence and its role in seeing off the Soviet challenge give NATO a claim to be among the most successful alliances in history. Problems in the 21st cent. suggest however that success can pose its own challenges.